Gender on the Borderlands: Re-textualizing the Classics

It has not been terribly popular to read against the racial grain, even in western/frontier U.S. history circles. Many texts and other efforts move toward multicultural inclusion or diversity training. To incorporate race or to address racism, however, is not the same as reading against the grain. Including race, or culture, or ethnicity simply means that an effort has been expended in the direction of a contribution, but the effort is not a fundamental reassessment of the old order of things. Reading in a contrary way, or pulling out of texts contradictions and foolish logic on the basis of race or ethnicity, can be a lonely scholarly undertaking, depending on the author's position in the academy. Sometimes it even results in poor teaching evaluations because the modern classroom is still grounded on affirmation and confirmation, on supporting a canon and not its revision. To envision bold and fierce re-readings of the historical record can also result in a divided classroom, a besieged professorate, or a university in crisis. Within ethnic studies endeavors of recent decades, however, a great deal of thought has gone into how one "teaches truth to power." The simple phrase captures eloquently a fundamental university mission (search for truth) as it lays bare the most basic reality: Those speaking truth are sometimes not in control of institutions of higher learning.

Within this context of revision, revising, and reversing, Chicano/a studies has been born. The texts produced by Chicano and Chicana writers and historians in the 1980s laid a foundation for revisionist insights and created a discourse community that continues to serve our study of the twentieth-century experiences of Mexican-origin people in the far West as in the Midwest, and increasingly in the South and Northeast United States. ¹

This historiographic productivity mirrors the problems of last century because many of the books published in the 1980s shied away from the seemingly distant colonial period; the nineteenth century in these history books usually warranted a passing glance, but rarely sustained attention. Some gave the earlier, critical centuries a perfunctory nod, but most stuck closely to English-based sources and documentary evidence written in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until recently, for example, most Chicano/a historians began their history courses in earlier centuries, lingering there only a week or two. This essay will work toward examining the significance of both trends—contributory history as a style or method versus analytical or interpretive work—and a Chicana history still lodged firmly in the most recent century. The trends have much to offer our discussions of gender on the borderlands, the title of the conference in 2001 that brought our work together.

Several aspects of the Chicano/a history written in the 1980s—its distinctly inclusionary tone and its effort and passion for inserting people of Mexican origin into the written historical record—paved the way for a type of history that has yet to achieve much status in the historical profession. Whether considered ethnohistory, Spanish borderlands studies, Southwestern history, ethnic studies, or American studies, the new work challenged older paradigms and made enormous headway in the use of original archival excavation. A few books were even hailed as "firsts." Vicki Ruiz's Cannery Women: Cannery Lives, published in 1987, was the first Chicana historical monograph written. ² A few others have won mainstream professional praise. John Chávez's The Lost Land, a survey text, was published in 1984 and was reviewed favorably in the major journals. ³ Arnoldo de León's The Tejano Community, 1836-1900, was hailed as a "major contribution to Texas historiography." ⁴ Most, however, fell under a category akin in history to Siberian exile: They were thought to contribute to the base of knowledge about Chicano/as, but only in a descriptive way. If acknowledged by the mainstream journals or the profession of history at all...